Quigley: Manning, Solitary Confinement, Occupy

Courage to Resist
Supporting Manning

Michael Moore:
Manning Started Occupy

Judge Challenges
Prosecution Secrecy

Contents of #3

1000 Days

Protests for
Manning: We Have Not Forgotten

Protest for Manning
in Illinois
Oct. 20

Protests for Manning
Sept. 6

Nobel Laureates
Defend Manning

Manning Denied Fair
Trial

Manning’s Detention
is Torture

Navy Violated
Protocol

Praise for Manning

1000 DAYS

Bradley Manning: 1,000 Days
in Detention and Secrecy Still ReignsEd Pilkington,
Guardian UK ,
February 24, 2013 (from David D)Pilkington
writes: "On Saturday Bradley Manning will mark his 1,000th day imprisoned
without trial. In the course of those thousand days...Manning has been on a
long and eventful journey."REA
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/304-justice/16179-bradley-manning-1000-days-in-detention-and-secrecy-still-reigns

Dear Dick,

As President Obama
accepts his party's nomination on September 6th, Pfc. Bradley Manning
supporters will gather at his campaign offices across the country to protest
the administration's inhumane treatment and secretive prosecution of the
accused WikiLeaks whistleblower.

We have to seize upon
the media spotlight on the Democratic National Convention and President Obama's
nomination in Charlotte to continue to raise America's
awareness of Bradley and the administration's unparalleled war on
whistleblowers.

Can you attend a
protest near you, or chip in $10+ to help us promote the protests with Facebook
ads?

-- OR --

Donate $10+ to help
us run Facebook ads recruiting Manning supporters to the protests.

Kevin Gosztola will
arrive at the DNC to cover events and demonstrations just after covering
Bradley's pretrial hearing at Ft.Meade this past week.

Organized by the
Bradley Manning Support Network, Afghans For Peace and SF Bay Iraq Veterans
Against the War, this protest aims to see demonstrations at Obama 2012 campaign
offices nationwide as the president takes the stage in Charlotte to accept his party's nomination.

President Obama has
tried to keep a tight lid on Bradley Manning's situation over the last few years
of his administration. The immense government secrecy surrounding the
investigation of Manning, WikiLeaks and their supporters -- combined with the
mainstream media's non-adversarial relationship with the institutions they
purport to keep in check -- has left the American public largely in the dark on
the subject.

But our efforts have
already succeeded in getting more journalists involved in covering this story,
and with the court martial expected sometime in January, we need to continue to
build momentum behind this trial. Your support of this protest at Obama
campaign offices across the country will draw attention to Bradley Manning just
as the president is making his case for re-election.

-- OR --

Donate $10+ to help
us run Facebook ads recruiting Manning supporters to the protests.

Thank you for your
support, from attending protests, to signing petitions, to calling government
officials and contributing to our coverage. We couldn't do this without you.

In solidarity,

Brian Sonenstein Campaign Director, Firedoglake

NOBEL LAUREATES SPEAK by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mairead Maguire,
Adolfo Peerez Esquivel. The
Nation (Dec. 3, 2012), p. 11.
Manning is a hero whistleblower who deserves the Noble Peace Prize for
revealing the truth about U.S.
foreign policy. He has injured
nobody. Thus the severe persecution
and prosecution of Manning should be
denounced by all decent people. (Dick)

“Military Madness and PFC
Manning” by Lynn Feinerman

From Tikkun, 7-2-12

Webs of blinding
irony are being spun around Private First Class Manning, obscuring the
military’s methodical denial of Manning’s constitutionally guaranteed right to
a fair trial. Read More http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/military-madness-and-pfc-manning

Head of Marine Corrections: Bradley Manning’s
brig staff violated Navy rulesFORT MEADE, MD -- Head of
Marine Corrections Chief Warrant Officer Galaviz today testified in court that
Marine staff at the Quantico brig, where WikiLeaks whistle-blower Bradley
Manning was held isolated in a 6x8 ft cell for nine months, failed to follow
national Marine protocol in several instances. Protocol was not followed
fully when it came to determining classification and assignment (C&A), the
two main factors dictating restrictions. Also violating Navy policy, Quantico ignored brig
psychiatristsâ€™ recommendations to remove PFC Manning from suicide watch,
which requires constant monitoring and removal of clothing. CWO Galvaniz described
the Prevention-of-Injury (POI) and Suicide Risk statuses upon which PFC Manning
remained during his time at Quantico as â€œinvasiveâ€ and also acknowledged
that being kept on them long-term could cause anxiety.

According to CWO Galaviz, a brig counselor should make a recommendation to the
C&A board responsible for determining custody and status, but should not
also be a voting member of the board. Quanticoâ€™s then-Gunnery Sergeant
Blenis earlier testified that he served as both PFC Manningâ€™s brig counselor
in making recommendations to the board, as well as senior voting member of the
board. Additionally, CWO Galaviz explained that C&A boards at all
Marine brigs had been instructed to use a standard DD form to assess a
prisonerâ€™s custody and status, and that the form should not be filled out
prior to C&A meetings, so that meeting discussion could dictate the
meetingâ€™s decision. In contrast with these instructions, Quantico used
not the standard DD form but a local improvised form, which led to more
subjective decision-making, and the brig counselor filled out the form and gave
his recommendation, in essence his vote, prior to the meetingâ€™s
beginning.

Finally, the brig violated Navy rules when it twice failed to remove PFC
Manning from Suicide Risk status in accordance with a brig psychiatristâ€™s
recommendation. CWO Galaviz testified that under Navy instructions,
Suicide Risk watch should be lifted less than a day after a psychiatrist found
it unnecessary. In PFC Bradley Manningâ€™s situation, the brig left him
in Suicide Risk status days after his psychiatrist asked he be removed.
The second time PFC Manning was asked to remove his clothing, brig
commander Barnes argued she was actually using a modified POI watch; however, the
higher-ranking CWO Galaviz believed that removal of clothing was essentially
the same as suicide watch, and the same protocol should apply. The
Quantico Marine brig staffâ€™s disrespect for psychiatristsâ€™ opinions of PFC
Manningâ€™s mental state appeared to be part of a pattern, as the C&A board
also went against three psychiatristsâ€™ recommendations in keeping him
on POI status. Testimony has revealed that Quantico brig commander ordered that PFC
Manning be kept on POI status pending a mental health assessment in March.
According to CWO Galaviz, this could have put the C&A board in the
position of simply going through the motions.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/04/manning-up/The Just
Actions of a ‘Fan of Sunshine’
Manning Up by RANDALL AMSTERWhatever one’s views
about his alleged actions, you would need a pretty hard shell not to be moved
by the case of Bradley Manning. Hero to some, traitor to others, this
diminutive soldier has endured an unprecedented level of mistreatment,
languishing in a largely incommunicado pretrial state for more than two years
and facing repeated episodes of humiliation and degradation. Compounding this
case is Manning’s status as a gay solider, for which he had experienced
repercussions well before gaining international notoriety as a purported
Wikileaks source for some of the whistleblowing site’s most damning allegations
about governmental and military machinations around the world.
Being accused of revealing the "emperor’s new clothes" is likely to
land one in hot water, but Manning’s
treatment has crossed all bounds of fairness, decency, and legality. Having
one’s life stripped down (literally) to its most basic functions, being
confined in a space barely the size of a standard bathroom, having to formally
ask even for toilet paper while standing at attention, and getting access to
the outdoors for only 20 minutes per day is the sort of thing that could drive
anyone mad. The fact that the military has justified the conditions of
Manning’s confinement by asserting that he was a suicide risk is a specious
argument; being in such a state can cause one to seek any way out, and putting
all options on the table is more a sign of sanity than the opposite.
We can speculate how any of us would hold up in similar circumstances, which
hopefully we’ll never have to find out. But the art and science of breaking
down the human spirit is quite well-developed by now, and the harshness of
Manning’s confinement is likely intended as a warning and deterrent to anyone
else even contemplating blowing the whistle on the architects of empire. It is
thus all the more important and impressive that Manning has endured this brutal
captivity — doing so through methods like dancing in his cell, "working
out" with imaginary weights, and making faces at himself in the small
mirror on the wall. Indeed, as Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional
Rights observed upon attending the recent hearing on Manning’s confinement, the
testimony Manning gave showed him to be "dignified, articulate, smart and
self-aware…. His incredible sincerity and strength was visible to all. We are
lucky to have people with the courage of Bradley Manning."
Where Manning found this resolve will likely be a subject for biographers
someday, but early signs indicate that the military itself may have ironically
contributed to it. From his first days as a soldier, Manning seemed to be
ill-suited for the role, at least in the eyes of some of his colleagues. In an
interview with The Guardian, an anonymous soldier who served with Manning
recalls the situation: "The kid was barely 5ft — he was a runt. And by
military standards and compared with everyone who was around there — he was a
runt. By military standards, ‘he’s a runt so pick on him’, or ‘he’s crazy —
pick on him’, or ‘he’s a faggot — pick on him.’ The guy took it from every
side. He couldn’t please anyone. And he tried. He really did…. A lot of people
let him down. He is not the first one they let down and he is not the last
one." If we subscribe to the school of thought that says our scars make us
stronger, then Manning’s early duress may have steeled him for what would come
later.
In another irony, Manning’s first post after basic training was at FortHuachuca
in southern Arizona,
where human rights activists would gather annually to demonstrate against the
base’s claim to fame as being the headquarters of U.S. Army military
intelligence and the place where the "torture manuals" for the War on
Terror were developed. The nonviolent protests there specifically addressed
cruel treatment of detainees: "We practice nonviolence at Ft.Huachuca
to call for civilian, human-rights centered oversight of all interrogation
training and practice, which must include absolute prohibition of cruel
treatment and command responsibility for any violation of this
prohibition." In fact, the history of nonviolent praxis is replete with
examples of people enduring suffering for their principles. Gandhi referred to
this as tapasya, meaning "austere devotion" and often implemented as
a willingness to suffer for one’s beliefs rather than inflict suffering on
another.
In the annals of nonviolence, Thoreau’s famed essay "Civil
Disobedience" stands out as a testament to the principled endurance of
unjust confinement: "Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the
true place for a just man is also a prison." In his equally celebrated
"Letter from a Birmingham Jail," Martin Luther King, Jr. extols the
virtues of myriad activists for justice "willingly going to jail for
conscience’ sake." Perhaps Manning, implicitly if not outright, was aware
of the essence of these teachings when he made the alleged decision to
transgress the hegemon by revealing its secrets. If so he would be in good
company, as validated by the "198 methods of nonviolent action"
developed by Gene Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution and their inclusion
of "disclosing identities of secret agents" among the list of tactics
— which we can extrapolate to include disclosing damning evidence of the sort
that Manning is said to have given to Wikileaks.
Manning may be guilty of revealing state secrets, but that action pales before
the state’s guilt in perpetrating atrocities and committing them to secrecy in
the first place. In a recent accounting of what these revelations demonstrate,
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange catalogues their import:
"The material that Bradley Manning is alleged to have leaked has
highlighted astonishing examples of U.S. subversion of the democratic process
around the world, systematic evasion of accountability for atrocities and
killings, and many other abuses…. the cables show that torture and killing are
not isolated events, but the violent manifestations of an aggressive policy of
coercion used by the United States in the pursuit of its strategic commercial
and political goals around the world."
The implications of this are wide-ranging and eminently clear: whatever
privileges of democratic governance and material comfort we enjoy here in the U.S.
(and in other privileged nations), they are provided at the expense of
innumerable underprivileged others’ democracy and comfort. Perhaps some are content
with this bargain, and they will accordingly construct Manning as a traitor.
Many others, however, grasp more deeply that such an inherently unequal system
is untenable and unjust. Eventually, it entraps even those nominally
"privileged" within its confines, turning us all into captives of a
sort as the tentacles of inequality and injustice expand their network. Again,
Assange, from a recent interview with Democracy Now! in which he considers the
digital-age implications:
"I think this tension between power and knowledge is extremely important.
So, we’ve all heard the saying that knowledge is power. Well, it’s true. And
the mass surveillance and mass interception that is occurring to all of us now
who use the internet is also a mass transfer of power from individuals into
extremely sophisticated state and private intelligence organizations and their
cronies. Now, if that is to be resisted, we must have a transfer of information
that is going the other way."
In getting to hear directly from Manning for the first time, we not only learn
more about his story and personal qualities, but also come to understand the
deeper connections between this small man and the big questions raised by his
alleged actions. Intriguingly, Manning’s testimony itself alludes to the basic
issues of transparency that determine whether the balance of power will be
struck in favor of "the people" or the entrenched "powers that
be" in the days ahead. As reported in The Guardian, in his landmark
pretrial testimony Manning reflected on the deprivation of natural light during
his excessive period of confinement. "I’m a fan of sunshine," he
stated. If we care at all about the cause of justice in our world, Bradley
Manning’s fortitude should render us all devotees of sunshine…Randall Amster, J.D., Ph.D., is the
Graduate Chair of Humanities at PrescottCollege. He serves as Executive Director of the Peace and Justice
Studies Association, and is the publisher and editor of New Clear Vision.
Among his recent books are Anarchism
Today (Praeger, 2012) and Lost in
Space: The Criminalization, Globalization, and Urban Ecology of Homelessness
(LFB Scholarly, 2008).

Professor McCoy Exposes the
History of CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the
War on Terror

We now take a look at what lies
behind the shocking images of torture at Abu Ghraib prison by turning to the history
of the CIA and torture techniques. Professor Alfred McCoy talks about his book "A
Question of Torture", a startling expose of the CIA
development of psychological torture from the Cold War to Abu Ghraib. CIA mercenaries
attempted to assassinate McCoy more than 30 years ago. Filed under Afghanistan

We now take a look at what lies
behind the shocking images of torture at Abu Ghraib by turning to the history
of the CIA and torture techniques. The International
Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International and other human rights groups
say the recently released images of abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib show
a clear violation of international humanitarian law. The U.S. made a pledge against torture
when Congress ratified the UN Convention
Against Torture in 1994–but it was ratified with reservations that exempted
the CIA’s psychological torture method. So what were the results?

A new expose gives an account of
the CIA’s secret efforts to develop new forms of torture spanning fifty years.
It reveals how the CIA perfected its methods,
distributing them across the world from Vietnam
to Iran to Central America,
uncovering the roots of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo torture scandals. The book is
titled "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation,
From the Cold War to the War on Terror."

Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison. Author of "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on
Terror" and also "The Politics of Heroin: CIA
Complicity in the Global Drug Trade."

This transcript is available free
of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf
and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous
contribution.Donate >

Transcript

AMYGOODMAN: A new expose gives an account of the C.I.A.'s
secret efforts to develop new forms of torture, spanning half a century. It
reveals how the C.I.A. perfected its methods, distributing them across the
world, from Vietnam to Iran to Central America, uncovering the roots of
the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo
torture scandals. The book is called A Question of Torture: C.I.A.
Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, and we're joined by
its author, Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin,
Madison. We welcome you to Democracy Now!

ALFRED McCOY: Thank you, Amy.

AMYGOODMAN: And glad to have you with us, especially in light
of your history. I first learned of you with your first book The Politics
of Heroin: C.I.A. Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, for which you
almost died. What happened then?

ALFRED McCOY: Oh, when I was researching that book in the
mountains of Laos, hiking from village to village, interviewing Laotian farmers
about their opium harvest, and they were telling me that they took it down to
the local helicopter pad where Air America helicopters would land, Air America
being a subsidiary of the C.I.A., and officers, tribal officers in the C.I.A.'s
secret army would buy the opium and fly it off to the C.I.A.'s secret compound,
where it would be transformed into heroin and ultimately wound up in South
Vietnam. And while I was doing that research, hiking from village to village,
interviewing farmers, we were ambushed by a group of C.I.A. mercenaries.
Fortunately, I had five militiamen from the village with me, and we shot our
way out of there, but they came quite close. Then later on, a C.I.A. operative
threatened to murder my interpreter unless I stopped doing that research. And
then when —

AMYGOODMAN: How did you know they were C.I.A.?

ALFRED McCOY: Oh, look, in the mountains of Laos, there aren’t that many white
guys, okay? I mean, the mercenaries? First of all, the C.I.A. ran what was
called the "Army Clandestine." They had a secret army, and those
soldiers that ambushed us were soldiers in the secret army. That, we knew.

AMYGOODMAN: The Laotian army?

ALFRED McCOY: The C.I.A.’s secret army.

AMYGOODMAN: The Laotian mercenaries?

ALFRED McCOY: Laotian mercenaries. That, everybody was clear
about that. Nobody denied that. They said it was sort of an accident, but, no,
it was very clear that it was intentional. And ultimately, when the book was in
press, the head of covert operations for the C.I.A. called up my offices and my
publisher in New York
and suggested that the publisher suppress the book. They then got the right to
prior review — the publisher compromised.

AMYGOODMAN: C.I.A. prior review.

ALFRED McCOY: Prior review of the manuscript, and they issued a
14-page critique. The publisher’s legal department, HarperCollins’s legal
department reviewed the critique, reviewed the manuscript, published the book
unchanged, not a word changed.

AMYGOODMAN: And the contention of that book was that the
C.I.A. was complicit in the global drug trade?

ALFRED McCOY: Right. In the context of conducting covert
operations around the globe, particularly in the Asian opium zone, which
stretched from the Golden Triangle of Vietnam and Laos all the way to
Afghanistan, that in those mountains far away from home, when the C.I.A. had to
mobilize tribal armies, the only allies were warlords, and when the C.I.A.
formed an alliance with them, the warlords used this alliance to become drug
lords, and the C.I.A. didn’t stop them from their involvement in the traffic.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, as a professor at the University
of Wisconsin, Madison, you have not stopped looking at the
C.I.A., and now you’ve written this new book. It’s called A Question of
Torture: C.I.A. Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror.
Give us a history lesson.

ALFRED McCOY: Well, if you look at the most famous of
photographs from Abu Ghraib, of the Iraqi standing on the box, arms extended
with a hood over his head and the fake electrical wires from his arms, okay? In
that photograph you can see the entire 50-year history of C.I.A. torture. It’s
very simple. He’s hooded for sensory disorientation, and his arms are extended
for self-inflicted pain. And those are the two very simple fundamental C.I.A.
techniques, developed at enormous cost.

From 1950 to 1962, the C.I.A. ran
a massive research project, a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind, spending
over $1 billion a year to crack the code of human consciousness, from both mass
persuasion and the use of coercion in individual interrogation. And what they
discovered — they tried LSD, they tried mescaline, they
tried all kinds of drugs, they tried electroshock, truth serum, sodium
pentathol. None of it worked. What worked was very simple behavioral findings,
outsourced to our leading universities — Harvard, Princeton,
Yale and McGill — and the first breakthrough came at McGill. And it’s in the
book. And here, you can see the — this is the — if you want show it, you can.
That graphic really shows —- that’s the seminal C.I.A. experiment done in Canada and McGillUniversity
-—

AMYGOODMAN: Describe it.

ALFRED McCOY: Oh, it’s very simple. Dr. Donald O. Hebb of McGillUniversity,
a brilliant psychologist, had a contract from the Canadian Defense Research
Board, which was a partner with the C.I.A. in this research, and he found that
he could induce a state of psychosis in an individual within 48 hours. It
didn’t take electroshock, truth serum, beating or pain. All he did was had
student volunteers sit in a cubicle with goggles, gloves and headphones,
earmuffs, so that they were cut off from their senses, and within 48 hours,
denied sensory stimulation, they would suffer, first hallucinations, then
ultimately breakdown.

And if you look at many of those
photographs, what do they show? They show people with bags over their head. If
you look at the photographs of the Guantanamo
detainees even today, they look exactly like those student volunteers in Dr.
Hebb’s original cubicle.

Now, then the second major
breakthrough that the C.I.A. had came here in New York City at Cornell
University Medical Center, where two eminent neurologists under contract from
the C.I.A. studied Soviet K.G.B. torture techniques, and they found that the
most effective K.G.B. technique was self-inflicted pain. You simply make
somebody stand for a day or two. And as they stand — okay, you’re not beating
them, they have no resentment — you tell them, "You’re doing this to
yourself. Cooperate with us, and you can sit down." And so, as they stand,
what happens is the fluids flow down to the legs, the legs swell, lesions form,
they erupt, they suppurate, hallucinations start, the kidneys shut down.

Now, if you look at the other
aspect of those photos, you’ll see that they’re short-shackled — okay? — that
they’re long-shackled, that they’re made — several of those photos you just
showed, one of them with a man with a bag on his arm, his arms are straight in
front of him, people are standing with their arms extended, that’s
self-inflicted pain. And the combination of those two techniques — sensory
disorientation and self-inflicted pain — is the basis of the C.I.A.’s
technique.

AMYGOODMAN: Who has pioneered this at the C.I.A.?

ALFRED McCOY: This was done by Technical Services Division.
Most of the in-house research involved drugs and all of the LSD
experiments that we heard about for years, but ultimately they were a negative
result. When you have any large massive research project, you get — you hit
dead ends, you hit brick walls, you get negative results. All the drugs didn’t
work. What did work was this.

AMYGOODMAN: But when you talk about the 'everyone knows the LSD experiments,' I don’t think everyone knows. In fact, I
would conjecture that more than 90% of Americans don’t know that the C.I.A. was
involved with LSD experiments on unwitting Americans.
Can you explain what they did?

ALFRED McCOY: Oh, sure. As a part of this comprehensive survey
of human consciousness, the C.I.A. tried every possible techniques. And one of
the things that they — at the time that this research started in the 1940s, a
Swiss pharmaceutical company developed LSD.

AMYGOODMAN: Which one?

ALFRED McCOY: I forget now. One of the major Swiss
pharmaceutical companies. And Dr. Hoffman there was the man who developed it.
The C.I.A. bought substantial doses, and they conducted experiments. One of the
most notorious experiments was that Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, inside the agency,
spiked the drinks of his co-workers, and one of those co-workers suffered a
breakdown, Dr. Frank Olson, and he either was —- I don’t know whether he was
pushed or jumped from a hotel here in New York City -—

AMYGOODMAN: His son has never stopped pursuing this case?

ALFRED McCOY: Right, his son Eric Olson insists that his father
was murdered by the C.I.A. Eric Olson believes that his father did a tour of
Europe, and he visited the ultimate Anglo-American test site, black site near
Frankfurt, where they were doing lethal experiments, fatal experiments, on
double agents and suspected double agents, and that his father returned
enormously upset by the discovery that this research was actually killing people,
and that, therefore, Eric Olson argues his father was killed by the C.I.A.,
that he was pushed.

AMYGOODMAN: And didn’t they do experiments in brothels in the
San Francisco
area?

ALFRED McCOY: They had two kind of party houses. They had one
in the San Francisco Bay Area, another in New
York City. And what they did in San Francisco was they
had prostitutes who go out to the streets, get individuals, bring them back,
give them a drink, and there would be a two-way mirror, and the C.I.A. would
photograph these people.

AMYGOODMAN: So, the C.I.A. were running the brothel.

ALFRED McCOY: They were running the brothel. They were running
all of these experiments, okay? They did that on Army soldiers through the Army
Chemical Warfare Division.

AMYGOODMAN: What did they do there?

ALFRED McCOY: Again, they gave them LSD
and other drugs to see what effect they would have.

AMYGOODMAN: And what did the soldiers think they were
getting?

ALFRED McCOY: They were just told they were participating in an
experiment for national defense.

AMYGOODMAN: Prisoners?

ALFRED McCOY: No, these were —

AMYGOODMAN: Right, but also on prisoners, were there
experiments?

ALFRED McCOY: There were some in prisons in the United States and also the DrugTreatmentCenter
in Lexington, Kentucky. The FederalDrugTreatmentCenter in Lexington, Kentucky,
had this. All of this research, all this very elaborate research —

AMYGOODMAN: On unwitting Americans?

ALFRED McCOY: Unwitting Americans, produced nothing, okay? What
they found time and time again is that electroshock didn’t work, and sodium
pentathol didn’t work, LSD certainly didn’t work. You
scramble the brain. You got unreliable information. But what did work was the
combination of these two rather boring, rather mundane behavioral techniques:
sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain.

And in 1963, the C.I.A. codified
these results in the so-called KUBARK
Counterintelligence Manual. If you just type the word "KUBARK"
into Google, you will get the manual, an actual copy of it, on your computer
screen, and you can read the techniques [ Read the report.
But if you do, read the footnotes, because that’s where the behavioral research
is. Now, this produced a distinctively American form of torture, the first real
revolution in the cruel science of pain in centuries, psychological torture,
and it’s the one that’s with us today, and it’s proved to be a very resilient,
quite adaptable, and an enormously destructive paradigm.

Let’s make one thing clear.
Americans refer to this often times in common parlance as "torture
light." Psychological to torture, people who are involved in treatment
tell us it’s far more destructive, does far more lasting damage to the human psyche
than does physical torture. As Senator McCain said, himself, last year when he
was debating his torture prohibition, faced with a choice between being beaten
and psychologically tortured, I’d rather be beaten. Okay? It does far more
lasting damage. It is far crueler than physical torture. This is something that
we don’t realize in this country.

Now, another thing we see is
those photographs is the psychological techniques, but the initial research
basically developed techniques for attacking universal human sensory receptors:
sight, sound, heat, cold, sense of time. That’s why all of the detainees
describe being put in dark rooms, being subjected to strobe lights, loud music,
okay? That’s sensory deprivation or sensory assault. Okay, that was sort of the
phase one of the C.I.A. research. But the paradigm has proved to be quite
adaptable.

Now, one of the things that
Donald Rumsfeld did, right at the start of the war of terror, in late 2002, he
appointed General Geoffrey Miller to be chief at Guantanamo, alright, because
the previous commanders at Guantanamo were too soft on the detainees, and
General Miller turned Guantanamo into a de facto behavioral research
laboratory, a kind of torture research laboratory. And under General Miller at Guantanamo, they perfected
the C.I.A. torture paradigm. They added two key techniques. They went beyond
the universal sensory receptors of the original research. They added to it an
attack on cultural sensitivity, particularly Arab male sensitivity to issues of
gender and sexual identity.

And then they went further still.
Under General Miller, they created these things called "Biscuit"
teams, behavioral science consultation teams, and they actually had qualified
military psychologists participating in the ongoing interrogation, and these
psychologists would identify individual phobias, like fear of dark or
attachment to mother, and by the time we’re done, by 2003, under General
Miller, Guantanamo had perfected the C.I.A. paradigm, and it had a three-fold
total assault on the human psyche: sensory receptors, self-inflicted pain,
cultural sensitivity, and individual fears and phobia.

AMYGOODMAN: And then they sent General Miller to, quote,
"Gitmo-ize" Abu Ghraib. Professor McCoy, we’re going to break for a
minute, and then we’ll come back. Professor Alfred McCoy, professor of history
at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
His latest book is called A Question of Torture: C.I.A. Interrogation, from
the Cold War to the War on Terror.

[break]

AMYGOODMAN: We are talking to Alfred McCoy, professor of
history at the University
of Wisconsin, Madison,
author of a number of books. The Politics of Heroin: C.I.A. Complicity in
the Global Drug Trade almost had him killed. Afterwards, the C.I.A. tried
to have the book squelched, but ultimately it was published. Then A
Question of Torture: C.I.A. Interrogation from the Cold War to the War On
Terror is his latest book, and we’re talking about the history of torture.
Continue with what you were saying, talking about the Biscuit teams, the use of
psychologists in Guantanamo, and then Geoffrey
Miller, going from Guantanamo
to, quote, "Gitmo-ize" Abu Ghraib.

ALFRED McCOY: In mid-2003, when the Iraqi resistance erupted,
the United States found it
had no intelligence assets; it had no way to contain the insurgency, and they —
the U.S.
military was in a state of panic. And at that moment, they began sweeping
across Iraq,
rounding up thousands of Iraqi suspects, putting many of them in Abu Ghraib
prison. At that point, in late August 2003, General Miller was sent from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib,
and he brought his techniques with him. He brought a CD, and he brought a
manual of his techniques. He gave them to the M.P. officers, the Military
Intelligence officers and to General Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S. Commander in Iraq.

In September of 2003, General
Sanchez issued orders, detailed orders, for expanded interrogation techniques
beyond those allowed in the U.S. Army Field Manual 3452, and if you look at
those techniques, what he’s ordering, in essence, is a combination of
self-inflicted pain, stress positions and sensory disorientation, and if you
look at the 1963 C.I.A. KUBARK Counterintelligence
Interrogation Manual, you look at the 1983 C.I.A. Interrogation Training Manual
that they used in Honduras for training Honduran officers in torture and
interrogation, and then twenty years later, you look at General Sanchez’s 2003
orders, there’s a striking continuity across this forty-year span, in both the
general principles, this total assault on the existential platforms of human
identity and existence, okay? And the specific techniques, the way of achieving
that, through the attack on these sensory receptors.

AMYGOODMAN: And Rumsfeld’s comment, when asked if it was
torture, when people were forced to stand hours on end, that he stands at his
desk?

ALFRED McCOY: Right, he wrote that in one of his memos. When he
was asked to review the Guantanamo
techniques in late 2003 or early 2004, he scribbled that marginal note and
said, you know, "I stand at my desk eight hours a day." He has a
designer standing desk. "How come we’re limiting these techniques of the
stress position to just four hours?" So, in other words, that was a clear
signal from the Defense Secretary. Now, one of the problems beyond the details
of these orders is torture is an extraordinarily dangerous thing. There’s an
absolute ban on torture for a very good reason. Torture taps into the deepest
recesses, unexplored recesses of human consciousness, where creation and
destruction coexist, where the infinite human capacity for kindness and
infinite human capacity for cruelty coexist, and it has a powerful perverse
appeal, and once it starts, both the perpetrators and the powerful who order
them, let it spread, and it spreads out of control.

So, I think when the Bush administration
gave those orders for, basically, techniques tantamount to torture at the start
of the war on terror, I think it was probably their intention that these be
limited to top al-Qaeda suspects, but within months, we were torturing hundreds
of Afghanis at Bagram near Kabul, and a few months later in 2003, through these
techniques, we were torturing literally thousands of Iraqis. And you can see in
those photos, beyond the details of the techniques that we’ve described, you
can see how that once it starts, it becomes this Dantesque hell, this kind of
play palace of the darkest recesses of human consciousness. That’s why it’s
necessary to maintain an absolute prohibition on torture. There is no such
thing as a little bit of torture. The whole myth of scientific surgical
torture, that torture advocates, academic advocates in this country came up
with, that’s impossible. That cannot operate. It will inevitably spread.

AMYGOODMAN: So when, Professor McCoy, you started seeing
these images, the first photos that came out at Abu Ghraib, the pictures we
showed of the, you know, hooded man, electrodes coming out of his fingers,
standing on the box, your response?

ALFRED McCOY: Oh, I mean, the reason I wrote this book is when
that photo came out in April 2004 on CBS news, at the Times,
William Safire, for example, writing in the New York Times said this
was the work of creeps. Later on, Defense Secretary Schlesinger said that this
was just abuse by a few people on the night shift. There was another phrase:
"Recycled hillbillies from Cumberland,
Maryland." In other words,
this was the bad apple thesis. We could blame these bad apples. I looked at
those photos, I didn’t see individual abuse. What I saw was two textbook
trademark C.I.A. psychological interrogation techniques: self-inflicted pain
and sensory disorientation.

AMYGOODMAN: We read our first headline today. It was about
Maher Arar and the case — the judge has thrown out against him, the
Canadian-Syrian man who was sent back to Syria
— the U.S.
government calls it "extraordinary rendition," and he was kept in an
underground "grave-like" cell, he described, very small. He was held
for almost a year. As you showed, and I looked at the book, the pictures of the
places where prisoners are kept, and in speaking to Maher, he’s described this
level of sensory deprivation. What about the shape and the size and the
coffin-like nature of these rooms?

ALFRED McCOY: The details are often left to the individual
interrogators, but the manuals basically describe how you control the process,
you control the environment right from the start when you pick somebody up. So,
for example, often times we see in Iraq of people when they’re
arrested, their arms are behind their back. They’re made to kneel in very
uncomfortable positions, and they’re hooded right away. That’s one of the
things they always specify is the time and conditions of arrest. You begin to
break them down. You create this artificial environment of control, and then
the techniques always vary. It can be extreme darkness or it can be extreme
light; it can be absence of sound or a bombardment of sound.

AMYGOODMAN: And that bombardment of sound is often joked
about. 'Oh, we played Britney Spears really loud,' or whatever it is. I don’t
know if it was her. But that’s become a joke when soldiers play loud music.

ALFRED McCOY: Well, though, actually, that’s one of the
problems of talking about this topic in the United States, is that we regard
all of this panoply of psychological techniques as "torture light,"
as somehow not really torture. Okay? And we’re the only country in the world
that does that. The U.N. convention bars — defines torture as the infliction of
severe psychological or physical pain. The U.N. convention which bans torture
in 1984 gives equal weight to psychological and physical techniques. We alone
as a society somehow exempt all of these psychological techniques. That dates
back, of course, to the way we ratified the convention in the first place.

Back in the early 1990s, when the
United States was emerging from the Cold War, and we began this process of, if
you will, disarming ourselves and getting beyond all of these techniques,
trying to sort of bring ourselves in line with rest of the international
community, when we sent that — when President Clinton sent the U.N.
Anti-Torture Convention to the U.S. Congress for ratification in 1994, he
included four detailed paragraphs of reservation that had, in fact, been
drafted by the Reagan administration, and he adopted them without so much as
changing a semicolon. And when you read those detailed paragraphs of
reservation, what you realize is this, is that the United States Congress
ratified the treaty, but basically we outlawed only physical torture. Those
photographs of reservation are carefully written to avoid one word in the 26
printed pages of the U.N. convention. That word is "mental."
Basically, we exempted psychological torture.

Now, another problem for the
United States, as well, was when the U.S. Army re-wrote the Army Field Manual
in 1992, the same period, while, although let’s say the civil authorities were
sort of skirting the law by exempting psychological techniques, the U.S. Army
re-wrote their field manual with the intention of strictly observing the letter
and the spirit of the U.N. Anti-Torture Convention and other similar treaties.
So what happened is that when the Defense Department gave orders for extreme
techniques, when General Sanchez gave orders for his techniques beyond the Army
Field Manual, what that meant is when the soldiers were actually investigated,
they had committed crimes under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. They
would be prosecuted, and they’re all being sent to jail.

AMYGOODMAN: Professor McCoy, you wrote a piece, "Why the
McCain Torture Ban Won’t Work: The Bush Legacy of Legalized Torture."

ALFRED McCOY: Right. Most Americans think that it’s over, that
in last year, December 2005, the U.S. Congress passed the Detainee Treatment
Act 2005, which in the language of Senator McCain, who was the original author
of that amendment to the defense appropriation, the author of that act, it bars
all inhumane or cruel treatment, and most people think that’s it, that it’s
over, okay? Actually, what has happened is the Bush administration fought that
amendment tooth and nail; they fought it with loopholes. Vice President Cheney
went to Senator McCain and asked for a specific exemption for the C.I.A. McCain
refused. The National Security Advisor went to McCain and asked for certain
kinds of exemptions for the C.I.A. He refused.

So then they started amending it.
Basically what happened is, through the process, they introduced loopholes.
Look, at the start of the war on terror, the Bush administration ordered
torture. President Bush said right on September 11, 2001, when he addressed the
nation, "I don’t care what the international lawyers say. We’re going to
kick some ass." Those were his words, and then it was up to his legal
advisors in the White House and the Justice Department to translate his
otherwise unlawful orders into legal directives, and they did it by crafting
three very controversial legal principles. One, that the President, as
Commander-in-Chief, could override laws and treaties. Two, that there was a
possible defense for C.I.A. interrogators who engage in torture, and the
defenses were of two kinds. First of all, they played around with the word
"severe," that torture is the infliction of severe pain. That’s when
Jay Bybee, who was Assistant Attorney General, wrote that memo in which he
said, "'severe' means equivalent to organ failure," in other words,
right up to the point of death. The other thing was that they came up with the
idea of intentionality. If a C.I.A. interrogator tortured, but the aim was
information, not pain, then he could say that he was not guilty. The third
principle, which was crafted by John Yoo, was Guantanamo
is not part of the United States;
it is exempt from the writ of U.S.
courts. Now, in the process of ratifying — sorry, passing the McCain torture —-
the torture prohibition, McCain’s ban on inhumane treatment, the White House
has cleverly twisted the legislation to re-establish these three key
principles. In his signing statement on December 30, President Bush said -—

AMYGOODMAN: This was the statement that he signed as he
signed the McCain so-called ban on torture?

ALFRED McCOY: Right, he emailed it at 8:00 at night from his
ranch in Crawford on December 30th, that he was signing this legislation into
law. He said, "I reserve the right, as Commander-in-Chief and as head of
the unitary executive, to do what I need to do to defend America." Okay, that was the
first thing. The next thing that happened is that McCain, as a compromise,
inserted into the legislation a provision that if a C.I.A. operative engages in
inhumane treatment or torture but believes that he or she was following a
lawful order, then that’s a defense. So they got the second principle, defense
for C.I.A. torturers. The third principle was —- is that the White House had
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina amend McCain’s amendment by inserting
language into it, saying that for the purposes of this act, the U.S. Navy base
at Guantanamo Bay is not on U.S. territory, and last month -—

AMYGOODMAN: Ten seconds.

ALFRED McCOY: So, and then in the last month, the Bush
administration has gone to federal courts and said, "Drop all of your habeas
corpus suits from Guantanamo."
There are 160 of them. They’ve gone to the Supreme Court and said, "Drop
your Guantanamo
case." They have, in fact, used that law to quash legal oversight of their
actions.

AMYGOODMAN: We have to leave it there. I want to thank you
very much, Professor Al McCoy, for speaking with us, professor of history at
University of Wisconsin, Madison, his book A Question of Torture: C.I.A.
Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War On Terror.

“A masterful account of an appalling
national drift toward accepting torture as part of our culture and polity.”—Alex Gibney, director, Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side

See above Interview with Author on Democracy
Now.

Many Americans have condemned the “enhanced
interrogation” techniques used in the War on Terror as a transgression of human
rights. But the United
States has done almost nothing to prosecute
past abuses or prevent future violations. Tracing this knotty contradiction from the 1950s to the present,
historian Alfred W. McCoy probes the political and cultural dynamics that have made impunity for
torture a bipartisan policy of the U.S. government.

During the Cold War, McCoy argues, the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency covertly funded psychological experiments designed to
weaken a subject’s resistance to interrogation. After the 9/11 terrorist
attacks, the CIA revived these harsh methods, while U.S. media was flooded with
seductive images that normalized torture for many Americans. Ten years later,
the U.S. had failed to
punish the perpetrators or the powerful who commanded them, and continued to
exploit intelligence extracted under torture by surrogates from Somalia to Afghanistan. Although Washington has publicly distanced itself from torture,
disturbing images from the prisons at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo
are seared into human memory, doing lasting damage to America’s moral authority as a
world leader.Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin– Madison. His many books
include Policing America’s Empire
and A Question of Torture.

Today
marks ten years since Bush administration lawyers drafted the infamous “torture
memos” that both enabled the torture of individuals held in U.S. detention and provided legal cover for U.S.
officials who participated in torture.

It has
been well-documented that in the years following the September 11, 2001
attacks, high-level U.S. officials committed, ordered, directed, authorized,
condoned, planned and otherwise aided and abetted, or failed to prevent or
punish, serious violations of international law, including torture. The torture
memos played a critical role in the U.S. torture program. To date, no
senior government official has been held accountable for torture, and there is
no pending criminal investigation into torture committed by U.S. officials. In fact the Obama
administration has made clear that neither the authors of the Bush
Administration’s “torture memos,” nor those who relied on these memos, will be
subject to investigation. Nor has there been accountability for the destruction
of at least 92 interrogation videotapes containing evidence of torture,
including the torture of detained men who are still in Guantánamo.

The
Bush administration tortured, but it is the Obama administration that is
creating a legacy of impunity for this torture. President Obama is compounding
this grim legacy by continuing indefinite detention without charge or trial at
Guantánamo—a practice that a recent Physicians for Human Rights report makes
clear is itself a form of torture. http://www.ccrjustice.org/get-involved/action/demand-accountability-u.s.-torture

Contact
Attorney General Eric Holder and demand that the U.S. Department of Justice
hold U.S. officials accountable for torture and other serious violations of
international law at Guantánamo and other U.S. detention sites. http://www.justice.gov/contact-us.html The Attorney General should appoint an
independent prosecutor with a full mandate to investigate and prosecute those
responsible for torture and other war crimes, as far up the chain of command as
the facts may lead.

Support
CCR’s work to hold U.S.
officials accountable for torture and war crimes by learning more about it and
sharing with others. Learn more about CCR's Bush Torture Indictment by visiting
our case page. http://www.ccrjustice.org/case-against-rumsfeld Also learn about our efforts in Germany, France
and Spain to hold U.S.
officials, including the lawyers who drafted the torture memos, accountable for
torture around the world by visiting CCR’s page on accountability. http://www.ccrjustice.org/case-against-rumsfeld The U.S. government has so far failed
to comply with its obligations to investigate and prosecute torture, but
together we can ensure torturers are held accountable.

Thank you for your continued support.

Sincerely,

Annette
Warren Dickerson

Director
of Education and Outreach

About Us

The
Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the
rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights

On October 7, 2003, the American Civil Liberties Union
filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all documents related to
post-9/11 detention and interrogation practices. The request was filed
simultaneously with the Defense Department, the State Department, the Justice
Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. By the following May, no
response had been issued, so the ACLU filed a second request, and in June took
the government to court in hopes of forcing it to comply. Three months later
the ACLU prevailed, and by the end of 2004 the documents were beginning to
flow. Since then, well over 130,000 pages have been released and posted to a
searchable database on the ACLU website.

The database contains, of course, the now infamous
“torture memos”: the arguments, crafted by George W. Bush’s closest legal
advisers, that waterboarding and the like were neither torturous nor
illegal—and that such considerations didn’t apply to US presidents (or indeed
anyone else in government, so long as the infliction of pain was not provably
his or her “specific intent”). But these were only a small handful of documents
among thousands: interrogation and torture logs, prison administration memos,
courtroom transcripts and minutes from policy meetings. Several such documents
known to exist have still not been released: in regard to one, the government
has argued that not only is its existence classified but so too is the font in
which it may or may not be written. Other records have been destroyed,
including at least ninety-two videos of CIA interrogations. Of the material
that has been released, much has been significantly redacted.

Despite these gaps (and in part because of them), this
vast forest of paper comprises a sprawling, fragmented alternative literature
on post-9/11 torture—one that lacks the coherence and pacing of many useful
books on the subject, but which is not without other values. To spend an
afternoon clicking through the ACLU database is to make some acquaintance, in a
way that only primary documents allow, with the fact that behind every US act
of torture is a massive, globe-spanning and poorly organized bureaucracy. Like
all bureaucracies, it has a language peculiarly its own, shot through with
jargon, euphemism and tics: empire whispering to itself in memo form.

In 2009 the ACLU hired Larry Siems, a poet and PENAmericanCenter program director,
to head a website called The Torture Report.
His charge was to write about post-9/11 prisoner abuse, relying as exclusively
as possible on the primary documents. Siems posted sections of the report as he
finished them, and they received running commentary from a set group of people
with relevant expertise, including lawyers, civil rights bloggers and a former
military interrogator. There were links to all documents referenced. The site
went live in September 2009, and Siems posted his final installment in March
2011. Now the full report has been released as a book, with the commenters’
suggestions and insights incorporated into the text.

For much of The
Torture Report, Siems focuses on a few particularly well-documented
and egregious cases. By his own admission, he barely touches on large swatches
of the post-9/11 torture project; there could easily be another fifty volumes
of The Torture Report.
Thankfully, he is also willing to roam freely through the document wilderness,
straying far from his central cases in search of context or common themes, and
quoting liberally along the way. The result is a compromise between the
tidiness of most narrative reportage and the chaos of the primary texts: a
story shaped by Siems, but very much co-narrated by his subjects.

* * *

Lingering with the documents as Siems does—offering a
play-by-play of the abuse—is a grim antidote of sorts for the simplifications
that have run rampant through the torture discourse of the past decade. The
first such simplification was that any instance of torture by US forces was
entirely the independent, extracurricular initiative of “bad apples” (“a
perverse, kinky group,” per TheWeekly Standard) on “the night
shift”—a phrase that was repeated ad nauseam as if it meant anything, as if it
was somehow obvious that what happens after sundown doesn’t really count. The “bad
apples” line has been thoroughly debunked and seems to have fallen out of
circulation, only to be replaced by a more accurate but equally thin cliché:
that the torture went “straight to the top” of the government. Much less
disclosed or understood is the exact nature of the channels running between
“the top” and the interrogation chamber.

Often they were quite direct. Describing the early
torture of Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi citizen, in a CIA prison in Thailand, Siems notes that every move his
interrogators made was cleared in advance by a cable from Langley. As one of them later described it,
“Before you laid a hand on him, you had to send in the cable saying, ‘He’s
uncooperative. Request permission to do X.’ And that permission would come.”
Whenever authorization was sought for more obviously torturous techniques, CIA
director George Tenet would bring the request to a meeting in the White House
Situation Room with his fellow National Security Council “principals,” a group
that included Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and John
Ashcroft.

But as deceitful (and unsavory) as it was for the Bush
administration to pin detainee abuse on a few “deviant” individuals, it is
equally inaccurate to assert that every incident of torture was directly ordered
or stage-managed from above, or that every technique involved had been cleared
in advance by a memo from on high. Needless to say, some were. Yet again and
again, the documents describe the process of new guidelines being drafted,
debated, edited and circulated, spelling out exactly which torture techniques
were now “legal”—only for interrogators to subsequently unleash a procedure not
listed, or even one explicitly banned.

Then, too, the language in which the limits were set
often betrayed their meaninglessness. “Approval of the use of all Category II
techniques and one Category III technique…is hereby rescinded,” Rumsfeld wrote
in a 2003 memo, responding to pressure from Alberto Mora, the Navy’s
anti-torture general counsel. But: “Should you determine that particular
techniques in either of these categories are warranted in an individual case,
you should forward that request to me.” Later that year, Rumsfeld wrote another
memo authorizing a new list of twenty-four techniques. It ended: “If, in your
view, you require additional interrogation techniques for a particular
detainee, you should provide me…a written request.” Predictably, more
â€¨requests would come. Perhaps equally predictably, individual interrogators
would continue improvising on the spot, as they had been from the start. In
Siems’s report, torture is obviously not just a matter of a few bad apples, but
equally obviously not just evil at the top. It is something else—something for
which no ready phrase exists.

This is oddly apt: failures of understanding are part and
parcel of institutionalized torture, which seems to require a systemic aversion
to detail, especially the details of other people’s experiences. The most
publicly visible manifestation of this aversion was the replacement of “torture”—in
both the legal memos and the pages of the nation’s leading newspapers—with
terms like “enhanced interrogation.” This same preference for detached
vagueness pervades The Torture Report.
“Cramped confinement involves the placement of the individual in a confined
space,” the administration lawyer John Yoo wrote in a 2002 memo. “The confined
space is usually dark.” Depending on the size of the space, “the individual can
stand up or sit down.”

Abu Zubaydah’s descriptions of his “cramped confinement,”
which Siems quotes, dwell on several aspects that Yoo passes over: how a cloth
was draped over his confinement box to restrict his air supply; how the box was
so small he could neither sit nor stand but instead had to crouch, which caused
a wound in his leg to rupture; how he was given a bucket to use as a toilet,
and how it tipped over and spilled while he remained inside for hours; how he
lost all sense of time. It is unclear whether Yoo left such details out
intentionally, or whether they simply never occurred to him. Similarly, it’s
hard to know what to make of a note written by Donald Rumsfeld in ink at the
bottom of a 2002 memo on detainee treatment that, among other things, set
limits on forced standing. “I stand for 8-10 hours a day,” he wrote. “Why is standing
limited to 4 hours?”

When the NSC principals met to consider authorizing “new”
techniques, they did not seek out testimony from people—US citizens or
otherwise—on whom they’d been inflicted in the past. Nor did they solicit
advice from those who study the effects of such techniques on the body and
mind. Instead, CIA agents would visit the principals in the Situation Room and
describe what they wanted done. Sometimes they even put on demonstrations.
Whatever these demonstrations showed, they surely did not include blood, urine,
feces, dogs, nudity or the presence of anything resembling the total domination
of one person by another, and the obliteration of his free will by fear.

In all likelihood, the CIA officers at those meetings
were drawing on training sessions they’d received at the Air Force Survival,
Evasion, Resistance and Escape school. SERE courses attempt, among other
things, to prepare US soldiers, agents and private contractors for possible
torture if captured abroad. But the differences between SERE simulations—even
those in which students are, for example, waterboarded—and life in a US
torture dungeon are many and crucial. SERE students have safe words. SERE
students know, somewhere in their minds, that it’s just training, which will
end at some point. If a SERE student is waterboarded, he is first made to do
jumping jacks, which increase his heart rate, making it easier for him to hold
his breath. (An insightful CIA report noted the difference between the
waterboarding on SERE’s curriculum and the CIA’s waterboarding in the field as
follows: “the Agency’s technique is different because it is ‘for real.’”) The
mental health of SERE students and instructors is closely monitored by
psychologists. In the most critical respects, SERE courses are more similar to
weekend camping than to a secret US prison. When the CIA
demonstrators went before the principals, then, they were likely presenting a
highly condensed and bowdlerized re-enactment not of torture but of a torture
simulation, creating a spectacle charged with torture’s frisson of power—the principals were,
after all, deciding the intimate fate of real people—but stripped clean of
every other defining detail. [

In The Torture Report, the
players seem interested in precision only when it comes to distancing
themselves from acts they knew to be vile. Time and again, the record shows
Americans fixated on what might be called “bureaucratic truth”—on claims and
distinctions that are meaningful primarily within a bureaucracy, but much less
so outside it. For example, since early 2009 the FBI has repeatedly objected to
the CIA’s preference for ineffective torture-based interrogation, especially as
compared with its own, rapport-oriented techniques—and rightly so. But watch
that concern in action, as described by Ali Soufan, an FBI agent who sparred
with the CIA about the best way to handle Abu Zubaydah:

The
Torture ReportWhat the Documents Say About America’s
Post-9/11 Torture Program.
By Larry Siems.Buy this book.

I protested to my superiors in the FBI and refused to be a part of what was
happening. The Director of the FBI, a man I deeply respect, agreed, passing the
message that “we don’t do that,” and I was pulled out….

The “we” invoked here is not the United States, but rather a single
division of its enormous government. It’s a near constant refrain: torture is
proceeding, and some group of interrogators—from the FBI, from the Defense
Department—is ordered by their superiors to “stand well clear.” Meanwhile,
another division proceeds, or farms out the dirty work to foreigners, and the
torture still happens. What does it matter—to, say, a detainee in the middle of
a waterboarding—whether it’s one agency or another doing the torturing?

This sort of hair-splitting goes straight to the top: during a principals’
meeting in 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft is reported to have wondered,
with some consternation, “Why are we talking about this in the White House?” He
didn’t wonder, “Why is this being talked about?” (and certainly not “Why is
this being done?”). Instead: not in this room. David Addington, Cheney’s legal
counsel, echoed this sentiment during a discussion about destroying
interrogation videos. As one participant put it, his response boiled down to
“Don’t bring this into the White House.”

Once or twice, The Torture Report itself
unwittingly parrots this mode of thinking, in annotations made by Matthew Alexander,
the pseudonym of a former Air Force interrogator who is a prominent critic of
torture. Pondering the use of techniques widely known to be useless for
gathering intelligence, he asks: “If our men and women in uniform were able to
accomplish their missions without the use of enhanced interrogation techniques
through the World Wars, Korea,
Vietnam,
and up to 9/11, what changed?” Leaving aside the question of exactly what
mission was accomplished in Vietnam,
Alexander seems unaware of (or uninterested in) Project Phoenix, a torture and
execution program designed and operated by the CIA during that war. Tens of
thousands were tortured, and at least 25,000 people were tortured and then
murdered (“pump and dump,” it was called)—some by CIA agents (Americans, just
not “in uniform”), most by CIA-trained Vietnamese acting on CIA instructions.
The latter was preferable, at least from a bureaucratic standpoint. As William
Colby, Phoenix’s
founder, put it: ideally, “not only were Americans not to participate…but they
were to make their objections known.”

America commits
torture, funds torture research and encourages torture around the world. It is
easy to point the finger at one particularly dark corner or another, be it the
CIA or the derelict grunts on the night shift. These documents suggest that a
bigger problem might be the sheer number of dark corners: American force abroad
is wielded and managed by so many overlapping but distinct organizations that
it creates plenty of useful ambiguity as to how, exactly, the overlap is meant
to work. There’s a clear sense, especially in memos related to the early days
of Guantánamo, of all these various people—Army, Navy, Air Force, CIA,
FBI—wandering the cell-block halls, unsure of who is doing what, when and to
whom. In the absence of a plan, everyone takes turns dealing with the detainees
as he or she sees fit. The guards watch, picking up ideas from the pros for
later. One could call the disarray a design flaw, but that would involve
assuming that torture wasn’t part of the plan. Given that we know it was, all
the confusion seems to have helped; CIA agents reveled in exploiting it, often
identifying themselves as FBI agents to avoid having their presence exposed or
accurately documented. Defense Department agents pulled a similar move, more
than once impersonating State Department officials during torture sessions.

* * *

In 2004, after CBS broadcast the first photographs of detainee abuse at Abu
Ghraib, many writers—most prominently Luc Sante, Susan Sontag and the historian
Hazel Carby—noted their striking similarity to the photographs of lynchings of
African-Americans taken from the end of the Civil War through the middle of the
twentieth century. As Carby in particular observed, both sets of images, along
with the acts they referenced, were attempts by Americans with power to calm
their anxieties about the uncer-â€¨tain future through ritualized spectacles of
domination, typically erotically charged, and always enacted on nonwhite
bodies.

Had the documents used in the composition of The Torture Report been available at the time, they might
have played a useful supporting role in this argument. I say this not only
because of all the forced nudity, sexual humiliation and threats of rape in the
documents but also because of how often the interrogators admit, implicitly or
otherwise, that they’re not primarily interested in gathering information.
(Indeed, one fascinating CIA memo explains the distinction between an
“interrogator” and a “debriefer” as follows: “A debriefer engages a detainee
solely through question and answer. An interrogator is a person who completes a
two-week interrogations training program, which is designed to train, qualify,
and certify a person to administer [enhanced interrogation techniques].” Put
more simply, in the CIA’s lexicon, “to interrogate” means “to torture.”)

At the beginning of Abu Zubaydah’s detention, his treatment was overseen by
an FBI team that used rapport-building techniques only. George Tenet was
impressed with the briefings they produced—until he found out they’d come from
FBI agents. A CIA team was immediately dispatched to take over. Never mind that
Tenet had already judged the intelligence good; torture came first. Some
prisoners came to understand this. During one of his interrogations at
Guantánamo’s CampX-Ray, Mohammed
al-Qahtani asked his questioner, “Sergeant A,” whether she truly wanted answers
to her questions. The log reads bluntly: “SGT A states she doesn’t need an
answer.” An earlier memo, proposing new tools for use on Qahtani, suggested
that “if necessary the detainee may have his mouth taped shut in order to keep
him from talking.”

Lynchings were highly public spectacles, attended by families bearing
picnic lunches; the photographs people took were widely and proudly circulated,
at least in the South, where they were commonly made into postcards. On this
front, contemporary US torture and its associated documents seem at first
different. Much of the visual evidence has been destroyed. The documents were
classified and released only over strong government objections, and even then
with key pieces withheld. The men and women who took the Abu Ghraib photos took
them only for their co-workers and family members. In 2009 the Obama
administration successfully blocked the court-ordered release of a cache of
previously unseen photos documenting prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan, and since then FOIA
requests have been made more difficult and less powerful.

Is torture simply less popular now than lynching was then? It seems more likely
that one set of rituals—those involving violent subjugation—has become closely
interwoven with another set: those designed to communicate a reassurance that
every action of the US government is necessary, legal and, most of all,
carefully thought out by â€¨well-intentioned officials. The spectacle of
lynching, and the photos documenting that spectacle, served as a boast and a
warning: look what we can do—and will. With post-9/11 detainee abuse, the exact
same message is being communicated, only so too is its negation: look what we
disown, what only the bad apples among us desire, and for which we will duly
jail them. Endless memos dissecting torture techniques and parsing existing
laws out of existence are a key part of this ritual: they insist that nothing
terrible is happening. In a 2002 meeting, a military lawyer was surprisingly
honest: “We will need documentation to protect us.” A CIA lawyer chimes in his
agreement: “Everything must be approved and documented.”

On September 24, the European Court of Human Rights
(ECHR) bowed to pressure from the US
and British governments and turned a blind eye to the torturous conditions at
the federal Supermax prison, ADX (short for Administrative Maximum), in Florence, Colorado,
where prisoners languish in long-term solitary confinement. Dealing a blow to
human rights on both sides of the Atlantic, the court rejected an appeal by
five terror suspects held in Britain
to block their extradition to the United States. The filing in Babar
Ahmad and Others v. UK argued that if the defendants are convicted, the
conditions of their confinement at ADX would violate their human rights.

While the prison at GuantánamoBay has long attracted global condemnation, the United States
has been more successful in shrouding domestic facilities like ADX from public
view. The European Court
allowed itself to be misled—accepting facts and figures roundly disputed by human
rights advocates and researchers and ignoring an intervention submitted by the
UN special rapporteur on torture.

Opened in 1994 and described by a former warden as a “clean version of
hell,” ADX was originally conceived by the Bureau of Prisons as a “behavior
management” facility. Prisoners “earned their way in” through bad or dangerous
behavior at other prisons (and could conceivably earn their way out). But after
9/11, BOP made any link to “terrorist activities” grounds for incarceration at
ADX. And so with the proliferation of these “material support” prosecutions,
the prison that holds Ted Kaczynski, Terry Nichols and Robert Hanssen has also
become a prison that disproportionately holds Muslim prisoners (even those
convicted on charges involving no specific plots, such as Fahad Hashmi, Dritan
Duka, Oussama Kassir and Seifullah Chapman).

The most restrictive prison in the federal system, ADX was built to keep
every prisoner in solitary confinement and designed to limit all communication
among prisoners. Cells are the size of a small bathroom with thick concrete
walls and steel doors. A prisoner must eat, sleep, shower, read, pray and use
the toilet in the cell. For one hour a day, prisoners may exercise in an
outdoor cage too small to run in or in a windowless indoor cell, empty except
for a pull-up bar. The outdoor “recreation” cages are known as “dog runs”
because they resemble kennels. The only “contact” ADX prisoners have with other
inmates is shouting to each other through toilets, vents or the outdoor cages.
They receive food through a slot and eat every meal alone within arm’s length
of their toilet. Psychiatric care at ADX often consists of shouting to
prisoners through their doors to inquire if they’re “OK.”

The isolation at ADX is even more severe for prisoners placed under Special
Administrative Measures (SAMs), issued by the attorney general when “there is
substantial risk that a prisoner’s communications…could result in death or
serious bodily injury.” No further justification is required. Disproportionately
used on terror suspects—and likely to be used on Ahmad et al.—SAMs typically
prohibit communication with anyone except attorneys or immediate family.
Letters to and from family can take up to six months to be cleared by the
government; no other nonlegal correspondence is allowed. Lawyers and family
members risk prosecution if they publicly disclose any detail from
conversations with a prisoner—thereby shielding any ill treatment from view or
sanction. Conditions for SAM prisoners at ADX have prompted hunger strikes and
forced feeding, but the public hasn’t learned about them because of this wall
of secrecy. Portions of declarations from SAM prisoners describing their
treatment have been put under seal by the court at the government’s request.

Beginning in 2007, the ECHR stayed the extraditions of Babar Ahmad and his
co-defendants to consider whether such transfers might breach the European
Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits torture and inhumane or degrading
treatment or punishment. The court made a series of requests for information
about ADX—requests the United
States initially refused to accommodate,
citing logistical and national security reasons.

After numerous extensions, on October 24, 2011, the Obama administration
finally submitted a report based on a “random sample” of just thirty prisoners.
(The facility holds 490 men.) The United States touted the modern
conditions at ADX, noting that prisoners get TV and “outdoor recreation,” and
arguing that, in fact, conditions there do not constitute solitary confinement
since prisoners can talk to guards and shout to each other through the walls.
Using its cherry-picked sample, the government claimed that prisoners spend an
average of 3.2 years in solitary at ADX and refused to provide any information
on the Special Security Unit, where SAM prisoners are held. A larger sample of
110 ADX prisoners, from legal research conducted in 2010 and 2011 for a capital
case, found an average of 8.2 years. This and other rebuttal evidence from the
defense—including a submission by UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan
Mendez—was rejected by the court on technical grounds.

ECHR judges were likely influenced by a visit to Washington on March 1,
when five current and former members attended a closed-door conference—“Judicial
Process and the Protection of Rights”—with Supreme Court Justices Stephen
Breyer, Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy and Sonia Sotomayor, as well as State
Department legal adviser Harold Koh and Derek Walton, Britain’s lead lawyer in Ahmad.
A month later, the ECHR ruled that the extradition could proceed.

* * *

The five defendants filed an appeal in July. More than 150 scholars
(including Bruce Ackerman, K. Anthony Appiah, Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak)
and twenty-six human rights groups (including the ACLU, the Center for
Constitutional Rights and Human Rights First) wrote to the ECHR asking it to
take the appeal. Their letter argued that the information provided by the Obama
administration was “insufficient and misleading” and failed “to account
honestly for the brutal conditions of confinement and isolation at ADX Florence
that regularly contribute to acute and long-term psychological damage to
prisoners housed there.” They further stressed that the decision would have
“serious implications…for legitimizing the use of conditions of confinement
that violate human rights.”

In rejecting the appeal, the ECHR ignored these entreaties, along with
voluminous defense submissions on the practice of solitary confinement in the United States and the inhumane treatment Muslim
prisoners encounter—not just at federal prisons but in pretrial facilities like
the MetropolitanCorrectionalCenter in New York. Conditions there have been
described as worse than at ADX; suspects are often held for years in pretrial
solitary confinement, degrading their ability to participate in their own
defense. SAM detainees exercise alone in an indoor cage. News from outside is
sharply restricted. The facility is dirty and prisoners have said it is so cold
in the winter they cannot concentrate. Prisoners placed under SAMs have a
camera on them at all times, including when they shower and use the toilet.
Some have been punished for attempting to speak through the walls; one man was
punished for using the Muslim greeting “Asalaam Aleikum.”

When other countries’ treatment of prisoners falls out of step with
international standards, the world community (at times prompted by the United
States) steps in to censure them. In January, the ECHR refused to extradite
alleged Al Qaeda affiliate Abu Qatada to Jordan on the grounds that the
legal system there countenances torture. But when the United States tortures prisoners
with years of solitary confinement, it gets away with it—with a stamp of
approval from a court designed to protect human rights.

In “New York’s Black Sites” (July 30-August 6),
Jean Casella and James Ridgeway reported that that a "blue" state
leads the nation in the use of “disciplinary segregation”—or as prisoners call
it: torture. The “Guantánamos Here at Home” were exposed by
Sally Eberhardt and Jeanne Theoharis in the February 11, 2011, issue—a story
that, unfortunately, remains timely.

Torture and the Forever WarMark Danner, MIT, 2011.Describing the unfolding torture of Guantanamo detainee Abu Zabaydah, Mark Danner
paints a vivid portrait with unsettling bodily and material details. But this
portrait is not presented simply for us to condemn; it serves to crystallize a
larger political condition.

Sometime on or
about September 11, 2001, Danner argues, our political condition changed. The
events of Zabaydah�s torture were the consequence
of a set of political choices that created what Danner calls �the
style of the exception.� That style coalesces around distinctive
features that have become familiar in our post-9/11 world and have not changed
in the transition to a new administration: a
declaration of an unending war against an enemy positioned outside the bounds
of all legality; a war guided by a legally unbounded executive, who controls
the public release of information and uses partisan domestic politics as a
continuation of the war by other means, in an improvisational style, and
without guidance from history or legal constraints.But in describing this new condition, placing blame is not
Danner�s most pressing concern. Those who created the style of the
exception, he argues, surely knew that a moment of judgment would come. Could
it be that they thought we would affirm the rightness of
their choices, and that in identical circumstances we would have done the same
thing?

Danner invites us to consider how, if we reject those
choices now, we might extricate ourselves from the style of the exception.

Mark Danner is an award-winning journalist and Professor
of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley,
who has written for more than two decades on foreign affairs and international
conflict. He is the author ofStripping Bare the Body,The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street
Memo and the Iraq War�s Buried History, and other books.